Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

New submitter Sesostris III writes "In April 2010, with £20,000 of government money, 6uk was set up to encourage the adoption of the IPv6 protocol in the UK. In December 2012 the board resigned en-masse in protest at official indifference to its work. 'The biggest organization we needed to join 6UK was the government,' the former director, Philip Sheldrake, is quoted as saying. Without government support, 'there's no material incentive for any organization to go for IPv6.' Government interest can be gauged by the fact that no government website currently sat on an IPv6 address. The UK is among the nations that have done the least to move to IPv6, and lags behind other nations in adopting the new protocol. In contrast, governments like that in the U.S. are encouraging adoption of the new protocol by mandating IPv6 compliance in contracts."

I come from an Asian country with mostly shared ip address space. The divitation was never honest. It was first-come-first-serve. Both US and UK have lots of ip addresses to use, and it's wrong. Asia has much larger population too! I don't expect any new change to it, but just stating the facts.

There's a large cultural difference. Many guys and girls on asia use web cafes. When they later get own connection theres not usually enough ip's. You're talking about billions of people. Not everyone is going to have their own ip address from that pool.

So? You could have gotten them while they were available. Mind you, you couldn't reserve them, you only got what you were actually going to use, but if you had a use for them, there was nothing stopping you from getting IPv4 addresses.

Now there aren't any IPv4 addresses left except the ones which are set aside for transitioning methods, but of course now you can get as many IPv6 addresses as you want. With IPv6 you're even encouraged to get as many as you're ever going to need right away, to reduce address

There's a large cultural difference. Many guys and girls on asia use web cafes. When they later get own connection theres not usually enough ip's. You're talking about billions of people. Not everyone is going to have their own ip address from that pool.

Which brings us back on topic: IPv6...
I have two IPv4 addresses, four computers, and 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses... all that's missing is for the people who run servers to get their shit straight.

Their business is golden as long as resources are very limited and controlled by them. When they adopt IPv6 it's like forefeit investment. v4 becomes obsolete and address pools turn into... So it's like "let's spend some money making our wealth into nothing."

According to Hurricane Electric [he.net] Asia (APNIC) has 18M addresses left while Europe (RIPE) has 17M. I will grant you that the US (ARIN) has nearly 100M, but we also have the largest use which explains the big allocation. And yet we're doing something about migrating to IPv6...

According to Hurricane Electric [he.net] Asia (APNIC) has 18M addresses left while Europe (RIPE) has 17M. I will grant you that the US (ARIN) has nearly 100M, but we also have the largest use which explains the big allocation. And yet we're doing something about migrating to IPv6...

Yeap, free them as soon as possible...:) and sell them while they still have value:)

How many of them are general use, as opposed to entire blocks locked up by companies who received them early? I'll bet you that the overwhelming majority of them belong to a handful of companies, which are not ISPs, and so that number for US is really bloated once one looks at the internals.

I am from Europe and I think that Asian countries have a huge advantage. You are forced to adopt IPv6, so while the rest of the world still hesitates and waits, you gain lots of experience and get plenty of people trained in a new technology that will eventually become essential. Once the rest of the world wakes up to the reality, you are ready. This actually worries me for my own country...

Pardon me for saying so, but what's so vitally important or different about IPv6? Is the Internet going to change in some way once we're all on IPv6? My impression is that it's more like the Y2K problem, a bunch of people have to work on a bunch of code to fix all the places it assumes an IP is a dotted quad and fits in 32 bits, but when all is said and done nobody is really going to notice the difference, except that it continues to work and scale. I don't really think you got "lots of experience and train

First, I agree w/ the GP. The Asian countries that have been forced to adapt IPv6 early have an advantage here.

That's the tough sell - the internet by itself is not gonna change - you won't see better websites, more shiny boxes. But to use the standard/. car analogy, if you had a V6 engine in a Subaru Tribeca replaced w/ a V8, would you notice any difference in the exterior? It's when you drive it on the I-5 that you'll notice a difference. It's the same w/ IPv6.

It wasn't a class 'deviation' as such. There are quite a few factors to note about IPv4:

a. It was an experimental protocol initially for DoD purposes only, and the scope of their coverage was really limited - for DoD, and arguably for NATO purposes. It was never meant for the general population at large. Since the major tech companies at the time - IBM, DEC, HP, AT&T, GE, Ford, et al were doing business w/ the DoD, they too got entire/24s from Jon Postel, who was the only guy distributing them. T

I've been using IPv6 for 8 years or so and I really don't care what other people do. The main value for me is that all boxen on the LAN have their own IPv6 IPs so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around. My websites all have IPv6 availability, but nobody uses that, so I see why people don't bother. But I personally think the benefits of having IPv6 on your own stuff makes learning and using it worth while.

All my sites have ipv6 availability too, and i get a surprising number of hits from v6 users... Quite a few isps seem to provide v6 by default now, and the users are generally not even aware that they have it.

Actually, that's what IPv6 day was about - last year, it was only supposed to be left on for a day, whereas this year, it was supposed to be left on permanently. As for the equipment, yeah, they need to make sure that any new CPE equipment they issue, as well as core and edge routers are IPv6 optimized.

While I strongly advocate for IPv6 adoption/support at the ISP, large scale network, and datacenter levels, I believe you're totally correct on your basic premise. Until having native IPv6 connectivity for your LAN devices represents a value add in terms of functionality, IPv4 only capabilities are fine for them. IPv6 and IPv4 can and do comfortably coexist; in fact, this is how the Internet will look for many, many years to come.

For a printer, IPv4 could well be adequate, except that computers are not gonna support 2 protocols forever - sooner or later, they'll drop IPv4. Rule of thumb - if a device is external facing, IPv6 ought to be mandatory, but that doesn't reduce the importance of the other things, be it camera resolution, packet switching speed, MAC table capacity and pricing.

Because people are generally used to IPv4 and can remember something like 192.168.0.1 or whatever, but when you get into IPv6 and use something like:2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329That's a bit harder... but oh, they made it easy because you can eliminate leading and consecutive 0's with colons or some shit so you end up with:2001:db8::ff00:42:8329But that doesn't make it easier... it's just totally fucking confusing. (Example stolen from Wikipedia)

The point - which if you look, way, way up, you may be able to see - is that the issue is also hidden from bean counters and decision makers until things actually grind to a halt.

Pre-emptive switching relies on techies to push it proactively. As one such, I have to admit to being IPv6 phobic. I like the simple dotted IPv4 addresses, they're familiar, they're comfortable, they are memorable and communicable - ever tried shouting an IPv6 address to across the room to Alice?

How long do you think 40 bit adresses would last before we ran out of those as well? When they designed IPv6, they considered 64bit addresses, but decided that it was a better idea to go straight to 128 and only have to do the transition ONCE instead of every 50 years.

Right, because end users give a flying fuck about the length of an ip address they NEVER SEE.

Im sorry. I wasnt aware it was end users implementing and deploying IPv6.As an Admin I refuse to deal with this long shit while IPv4 works just fine. I will NAT the crap out of it if I have to just to ignore IPv6 longer.

As an Admin I refuse to deal with this long shit while IPv4 works just fine. I will NAT the crap out of it if I have to just to ignore IPv6 longer.

And I hope it's *real* issue which is preventing me from using IPv6 today, and not this kind of pettiness (or job security, or whatever psychology is behind the anti-IPv6 attitudes you encounter on Slashdot).

I've been using IPv6 for 8 years or so and I really don't care what other people do. The main value for me is that all boxen on the LAN have their own IPv6 IPs so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around.

Really, that was it? What was wrong with giving them a 192.168.x.x or even 10.x.x.x IPv4 address, you have over 16 million "boxen" on your network so you ran out?

The answer to that was in the part you quoted. "so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around." Presumably, he didn't mean "while I'm sitting in my house"

And how exactly would he have been doing that for the last 8 years when "the rest of the world" for the most part haven't used IPv6, so none of his boxes could be reached? If you need to connect to an IPv4/IPv6 bridge then you could have just as easily done a port forward instead.

Absolutely agree, I do the same for home use. Only trouble is that when I get proper native IPv6 my addresses are going to change around all the time (Some DNS update script will fix that though). Another good thing is to use transport mode IPSec, so all connections between the computers are encrypted, and only allow minimal stuff like SSH without IPSec. There's nothing like browsing my 8 TB share from anywhere on my Windows laptop, or watching MythTV (well there *is* something like that called a Slingbox,

Why will your IPv6 address change all the time? If you get a/64 link, from your CPE, you should be able to adjust whether your addresses are static or dynamic. Hopefully, your CPE supports DHCP6, which should allow you to set it whichever way you prefer. And if one knows the DHCP6 scripting, one should be able to assign both static and dynamic addresses here, since in IPv6, interfaces are allowed to have multiple addresses.

They lasted a lot longer than I expected. £20,000 is a really small amount of money so for it to last over two years is impressive.

£20,000 isn't a "really" small amount of money. £20,000 is an absurdly small amount of money.:-O

I notice that the website describes it as "seed funding". Realistically, I'd have thought that £20,000 was very low even for that purpose. That would about cover the pay of a *single* person for *one* year at less than average UK wages. And that wouldn't leave anything over for expenses.

At any rate, I was going to comment something along the lines of...

April 2010 - Labour gives government support to new body 6uk.
May 2010 - Labour kicked out of power, David Cameron and his Etonian chums, er... the Conservatives come in to power. Somewhat indifferent to Labour-supported project. Hmm.

I hate to say it, but I think IPv6 is at the bottom of the priority queue of David Cameron. Anything that drive up the cost should be avoided. This includes the cost of equipment upgrade, and the cost of hiring sensible contractor...

I think the government is a bit too thick to see that mandating IPv6 is a business opportunity for the private sectors...

if you think you have to upgrade to do IPv6, you're either foolhardy or not buying the right equipment in the first place. If you buy the right stuff no upgrades should be required for IPv6 functionality, including hiring people.

if you think you have to upgrade to do IPv6, you're either foolhardy or not buying the right equipment in the first place. If you buy the right stuff no upgrades should be required for IPv6 functionality, including hiring people.

Even if all your hardware supports IPv6 out of the box (which most of the major stuff does these days), there is still plenty that goes wrong in the software world. Tons of fucked up protocols out there, like SIP, that the devices and software doesn't handle IPv6 quite right to this day. I've seen plenty of stuff that stored IPs in databases using fields that v6 addresses wouldn't fit in. Both the App has to be upgraded and DB schematic changed. There are still plenty of expensive messes from the past that

Right, so the best course of action is to buy new stuff so the government doesn't have to buy new stuff to get ip6 working.

News flash: governments probably have shit from the 1990s sitting around, quietly humming away at some critical task, forgotten in a closet somewhere. It works, it's fine, and leave it alone, that's the attitude.

A lot of this gear probably predates the RFCs, let alone the actual devices that support ip6.

if you think you have to upgrade to do IPv6, you're either foolhardy or not buying the right equipment in the first place.

Or you have just had the equipment for a while. Proper routers that can route IP packets in hardware are expensive so companies generally only replace them when they have to.

AIUI there are plenty of older routers out there that do v4 in hardware but do v6 in software. So you can bring up IPv6 on them and everything is fine until people start really using it then you have problems and the only solutions are to either turn off IPv6 or do a forklift upgrade. For some ISPs the forklift upgrades were needed anyw

Cameron is a conservative. He and his business constituency are only interesting in making money right now and have no interest in the future except for their own personal fortunes. This is true of conservatives all over the world. This is why the infrastructure in the US and Japan is falling apart: "No new taxes". Wall Street is not a source of capital for innovations, it is a rigged casino that fleeces investors and governments for insider profits. It is much more lucrative to run scams like high freque

Exactly, the incentive is icing on the cake, the cake however is switch to IPv6 or get off the internet grid. It does cost business man-hours and carries a potential of downtime, but every business IT team is competent enough to do this right?:)

The UK is currently in the process of developing & deploying a network for government agencies to use called the PSN [cabinetoffice.gov.uk] (public services network). It's sort of a replacement for the GSI [wikipedia.org]. It runs on IPv4, most likely using the DWP address space discussed here [slashdot.org].

Pretty much all the UK telcos & several global network manufacturers are involved with the PSN so it's a real missed opportunity that they didn't go with IPv6 for it.

(I've been at this too long. I remember when the ARPANET went from 8-bit to 16-bit IMP addresses. I ordered one of the first class B networks in the early 1980s, [128.5.xxx.xxx]. I considered ordering a class C, but there was no charge for a class B, and we thought we might exceed 256 hosts some day.)

I like to observe the ineptitude of governments around the world in driving IPv6 adoption and compare it with their similarly inept response to Global Warming.

In both cases, a slow but steady change is going to cause inevitable disaster. Foresight and planning is required, and government incentives or lawmaking is basically a must, because in both cases no individual benefits from saving the world, so why spend the money?

The difference is that the IP address shortage is a trivial problem to foresee and solve. It's like a toy version of Global Warming. A mock disaster to test the government's mettle. For example, unlike Global Warming, the IP address shortage is trivially predicted. We knew what month the last block was going to run out something like two years ahead of time! It's simple maths. There's no theory. There's no complex feedback cycles. There's no doubt. We have a fixed, unchangeable amount of something, we're using it faster and faster, there's still a huge number of potential users. It's going to run out.

Similarly, the fix is also trivial compared to Global Warming. Had, say, the EU made a new law that all imported electronics that can be connected to the Internet have mandatory IPv6 support enabled by default, that alone would have been sufficient. That's it. A piece of legislation, requiring some talking and a few pieces of paper. The cost of some electronics might have gone up an average of 50c or somesuch, but the problem would have been solved practically overnight! No manufacturer with a global market could afford to neglect IPv6 support. Common software platforms would have resulted in IPv6 everywhere, for everyone, because of one change in one law in one place.

Instead, what do we get? Half-solutions like NAT. Various groups with no teeth that can "encourage" and "assist" the adoption of IPv6. Piecemeal adoption that means that nobody can go IPv6-only any time soon. Meetings with "industry experts", half of which work for corporations that still have an IPv4-only Internet presence. Conferences. Studies. Wastes of time and money.

I bet 90% of legislators around the world haven't even heard of IPv6, or still don't know what it's all about.

Meanwhile, think about it: in the Western world and increasingly everywhere else, Internet access is now basically an "essential human right", much like clean drinking water, transport, electricity, or health care. I mean seriously, would YOU buy a house in a location where you could get water and electricity, but not the Internet? Exactly.

Now go back to the legislators. This -- now essential -- service is breaking in a trivially predictable way, and they haven't even fucking bothered to do the simplest things to actually fix the problem.

Instead what we're going to see is parasitic rent-seeking: the value of IPv4 addresses will skyrocket. Full, bi-directional Internet access will become a privilege, concentrated into the hands of corporations. Their investments in addresses will appreciate over time, hence predictably they will have a vested interest in maintaining and growing this wealth. Expect to see dirty tactics and corruption used to block IPv6 adoption to prevent a devaluation of IPv4 address "property". This might get bad enough that IPv6 will never be adopted, because there will be significant pressure against it!

Now think about how much worse Global Warming is going to be! It's far off into the future. Decades at least until serious effects are felt anywhere. The science is complex, and difficult for laymen to understand. There are already vested interests to deny it, to the tune of trillions of dollars. The fix -- if any -- wouldn't be 50c per purchase, it might be more like 50%!

Oh, various reasons, ranging from party-tribalism, PR (advertising that speaks to our emotions rather than to our reason), short-termism (individually and collectively), a biased press, and even the electoral system. Talking of which, we had the opportunity recently (in the UK) to try and improve (albeit slightly) our electoral system, and in a referendum, it was rejected - and rejected by a large margin - by the voters. I've really never quite understood why.

We're out of IPv4s, we've been out for ages. What has changed? Nothing. So what.

UK still has almost two IPv4 addresses/each person [wikipedia.org].If considering the Internet users only, UK has about 2.43 IPv4/each user (exaggerating a bit, you can say that each Internet user in UK can have one client and one server with their own IPv4).If you throw into the picture the number of households [ons.gov.uk] (which can share a NAT-ing router) - it comes to 6.7 IPv4/household.

UK still has almost two IPv4 addresses/each person [wikipedia.org].If considering the Internet users only, UK has about 2.43 IPv4/each user (exaggerating a bit, you can say that each Internet user in UK can have one client and one server with their own IPv4).If you throw into the picture the number of households [ons.gov.uk] (which can share a NAT-ing router) - it comes to 6.7 IPv4/household.

I won't say it's completely 'trivial'. There's a lot of software out there that can and does bug out with IPv6, most of it's older, but not all of it. Always interesting when someone sticks the first 32-bits of of an IP6 in a database meant for IPv4. The cost of making sure any software that evaluates IP addresses compliance with v6 will be -very- expensive.

Other then that, people can be very bad at dealing with creeping problems.

I can say from having worked in both private and public sectors that government is predictably not a first adopter of emerging technology. There may be occasional small bursts of innovation here and there, but overnment culture is highly conservative by nature.

You don't get points for taking risk with taxpayers' money. You do, however, get points for showing an abundance of caution which typically leads to endless meetings, signoffs, prototypes that nobody can be bothered to evaluate and reams of docum

This is exactly the thought that struck me. What made 6uk think that w/o government endorsement and support, they are doomed? Work on the rest of the industry - start w/ ISPs, then check out consumers and see how many are still on XP, as opposed to platforms that support IPv6, such as Windows 7, OS-X, Linux and BSD. Once that is done, work on getting ISPs to migrate to IPv6, have campaigns to get people support IPv6 first for their websites, and so on. Once the government sees that that's where everybod

Every once in a while I go looking. I know I can type some arcane commands into Linux, and make the router route IPv6. However, for any of my customers, I need either a GUI or a webpage based tool. The ease of configuration, the ability to set up a wireless bridge, and the configuration options on DNSMasq, keeps me coming back to DD-WRT.

Is there a more modern device with a Linux based kernel, at a reasonable price, that does IPv6 and is set up with a GUI an

Usually, I'm using DD-WRT in a small application. For instance, on a remote computer node that needs to connect to the office wirelessly. A small business or home network (less than 5 computers.) The home network of a business person that needs to connect to the office. etc.

If it's overkill for domestic, then how is Monowall? It's had IPv6 support a lot longer, from what I can tell. Also, BSD has supported IPv6 a lot longer than Linux has, and also, while I'm not sure whether Linux has this or not, FreeBSD has an IPv6-only mode, which completely disables IPv4 and lets one test one's IPv6 connectivity w/o getting any fallback-based wrong signals. If you must have Linux, you might want to go w/ OpenWRT, although I'm not sure how superior the IPv6 support there is over IPv4.

The reason I say it's overkill for domestic is it has a list of features that goes on and on, but probably 95% of them would never be used in a domestic setting. It's also missing some features you would want in domestic - for instance, half-decent ADSL support and AIUI wireless support is somewhat lagging.

pfSense is a fork of m0n0wall - they forked some time ago so I'm not sure how far they've separated.

It's been a while since i've used DD-WRT. Last I checked, it was still using the 2.4 kernel with the closed-source drvier on many broadcom devices. Linux 2.6 has been out for 9 years, and the open source broadcom drivers have stabilized much since then.

I highly recommend OpenWRT with its Luci configuration interface. You're going to find it a worthwhile replacement for DD-WRT, including native IPv6 support (provided you go with the broadcom-2.6 kernel). You don't need to know much about using the command li

Of course Governments are indifferent, every large organisation resists change. You have to be like a wasp in their pocket, constantly giving them little stings. Blaming the UK Government for lack of IPv6 adoption is the lazy way out.

In contract the Irish IPv6 Task Force, devoid of any Government funding, frequently had Cabinet-level Ministers at its conferences and gave them an absolute grilling. Did you know that Irish procurement regulations require all IT equipment to be dual-stack capable out-of-the

comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric - come to think of it - they still have a monarchy smack dab in the middle of their democracy - the british dont like change - and i dont think that'll change anytime soon..

comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric

I don't know why you state this so confidently when you are almost completely wrong.

Nearly all units in the UK are officially metric, with the official change having taken place many years ago (pre 1980) apart from a few very specific exceptions like road signs (miles/mph) beer (pints) milk (mostly pints, sometimes litres).

Informally, most people use a mishmash of imperial and metric, often switching between the two for convenience.